The story so far: For many decades, one of the great challenges in artificial intelligence (AI) has been teaching machines to reason. Reasoning goes beyond memorising facts or completing sentences. It’s the ability to follow steps, reflect on mistakes, and adjust strategies until the right answer is found. Humans use reasoning for everything from solving … Read more
Image for representation purposes only. | Photo Credit: Getty Images The National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), in a collaborative study, have found that two simple environmental factors — calcium and pH — dictate whether the cancer spheroids hold together, fall apart, or even rebuild themselves from scratch. Floating cluster of cells When ovarian cancer … Read more
Science quiz: Tinkering with storms Visual: Name this 1947 hurricane that became the subject of controversy after its sharp turn to the northeast, into Florida, was blamed on cloud-seeding. START THE QUIZ 1 / 6 | Name this 1947 hurricane that became the subject of controversy after its sharp turn to the northeast, into Florida, … Read more
Ion chromatography, or the process of separating ions from a sample by passing it through a long column, is usually carried out in a laboratory using expensive, sophisticated equipment. Now, scientists at the University of Tasmania in Australia have devised a simpler way to perform the technique out in the field — one that could … Read more
While pigments interact with light and their surroundings to produce specific colours, the hex triplet #1099D6 (shown) approximates what manganese blue might have looked like. | Photo Credit: Google Jackson Pollock’s Number 1A, 1948 is one of the most famous examples of action painting, where paint is dripped, splashed, and layered onto a surface. While … Read more
A Kanizsa triangle. | Photo Credit: Fibonacci (CC BY-SA) A: Our brains fall for optical illusions because of the ways in which they perceive the world, including using contextual information, shortcuts, and predictions. Among other patterns, the brain assumes light comes from above, fills missing edges, and exaggerates contrasts. While these tricks help us navigate … Read more
Ice is almost everywhere on the earth — in glaciers, snow, and clouds. Despite being so common, it still hides mysteries about its physical properties. A long-standing puzzle concerns its electrical behaviour. Every water molecule is polar, meaning it has a positive and a negative end. But when water freezes into ordinary hexagonal ice (known … Read more
Examples of Early and Middle Holocene human burials from southern China. This figure shows six human burials from Huiyaotian in Nanning and Liyupo in Long’an, both shell-midden sites located in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. | Photo Credit: PNAS 122 (38) e2515103122 Archaeologists working in southeast Asia have long been puzzled by pre-farming burials dating … Read more
While pigments interact with light and their surroundings to produce specific colours, the hex triplet #1099D6 (shown) approximates what manganese blue might have looked like. | Photo Credit: Google Jackson Pollock’s Number 1A, 1948 is one of the most famous examples of action painting, where paint is dripped, splashed, and layered onto a surface. While … Read more
These days, an inky, sightless night is a rare sight in much of the world. From the harsh glare of streetlamps that make us squint to the gaudy flicker of neon billboards that force sunglass shields, artificial light is blurring the line between day and night. This has meant birds stay active for almost an … Read more